The Reward of Being Alive

On Sunday, we put up our annual kimchi harvest, which means that right now, there are 50-odd quarts of vegetables fermenting in the kitchen, and the house is redolent with the fetid odor of dirty socks. If you’ve done any quantity of lacto-fermenting (or been within a half-mile of Fin and Rye when they kick off their rubber boots on a July afternoon), you know exactly the smell I’m talking about. It is one of those smells – like cow shit, or the hot innards of a nice, fat hog – that I used to think of as unpleasant, but now consider emblematic of a very specific time, place, and process and therefore have come to appreciate.

Kimchi is a staple food for us; it is a large part of answer to the question I field frequently: “What do you do for green vegetables in the winter?” We eat a couple quarts of kimchi per week over the winter months; by April this becomes tiresome, which is mighty convenient, since by April we’re grazing the first early salads in the big, season-extending greenhouse off the southwest wall of the living room. It has been many years since we’ve purchased fresh vegetables in winter (which means it’s been many years since we’ve purchased fresh vegetables at all), and while I’m not suggesting anyone emulate this habit, I can report that’s it’s really not so bad. We’ve got the kimchi. We dig brussels sprouts and kale from under the first big snows. Carrots in the season-extending hoop house. Fermented green beans. And of course all the root crops. So, yeah, don’t come here in February expecting a plate of those trendy “micro-greens” or nothing like that. But if you want a big ol’ baked ‘tater with a dollop of summer gold (aka “butter”) and a side o’ fermented-something-or-other, we got you covered.

Our kimchi includes cabbage, kale, onion, garlic, ginger, radish, carrots, and, of course, salt. Penny’s none too big on spicy foods (the poor, deprived girl), so we throw matchbox peppers into a few quarts for me n’ the boys, but mostly, it’s pretty tame stuff. In fact, our kimchi is renown in our small circle of fermenting associates for being particularly sweet, a quality I can only attribute to our soil revitalization efforts. Every since we began amending seriously, all our vegetables have gotten sweeter. And bigger: Crikey but the cabbages we harvested this year. Behemoth things. We’d already planted fewer rows than ever before, knowing our yields were going through the freakin’ roof, but this year topped ‘em all. Pretty soon, we’ll be growing a single cabbage each year, which we’ll harvest with Melvin’s round bale grabber.

Kimchi is one of those seasonal rituals we’ve always tackled as a family, every since the boys had to propped up in a corner to drool and coo and piss their pants. Oh, sure, the boys are prone to drifting in and out of the process, which is understandable, since we chop everything by hand (including, this year, the tip of the ring finger on my left hand, which escaped removal-by-knife by only the scantest of margins. Gonna be a hell of a scar, but Penny’s already told me she digs scars) and by the time it’s all chopped and pounded and jarred and whatnot, it’s a full day’s undertaking. But we’re glad for their help and I cannot deny gleaning a degree of satisfaction from the simple fact that they enjoy participating in work that is so tangibly productive and so essential to the health and well being of our family. And that they know the process so intimately – from the planting, to the tending, to the harvesting, to the processing, to the eating – and are fully aware of their role within it.

A typical scene: Penny working, me leaning against something

I have written before about ritual and about the need for children to contribute to the family and community in ways that are not merely abstract, but result in something both tangible and essential. But of course it is not merely children that need such things, and the older I get, the more I recognize how it is precisely that work which is tied to seasonal routine and results in some fundamental building block of my family’s survival (and perhaps even a handful of people beyond my family) that is most rewarding to me. Kimchi. Firewood. Haying. Sugaring. And so on.

I’m not sure exactly how to say it other than to note that there is something so damn real about these tasks. They are the ones that cost us little in money, but plenty in sweat. They cost us in sore muscles and, as evidenced by the bandages currently gracing my left hand, occasionally even blood. But the return is so much greater than the sum of all these small tolls. It is greater than all those bubbling, stinking jars of winter’s sustenance. It is greater, even, than the simple pleasure of my family coming together toward a common purpose. For me, anyway, it is nothing less than the reward of being alive.